We have been so busy this week! In math we are finishing up addition and subtraction. We have been working in our math workshop stations. We also had a problem solving day! We were so busy I forgot to take pictures! In Reading we have been taking time to really think about the characters in our books. We made a sketch and then thought about inside and outside character traits. This was also good practice using our Reader's Notebooks! In Social Studies, we are concluding out Map Skills unit with a final project. The students are showing their knowledge and what they learned by creating their own maps and writing directions. Here are lots of hardworking students and some finished products! During Writers' Workshop we are continuing our narrative story writing. We have learned how to come up with ideas, how to plan our story, and practiced stretching our writing scene by scene. We have started our first Science unit this year and it is about Energy. We started with electric energy and worked to discover what is needed to light a lightbulb! We had a great visit to the LMC and we love the comfy Yogibo chairs Mrs. Cowell has. There was a raffle going on as well. There were so many new books that Mrs. Cowell had a raffle to see who would be the first students to get to check them out! From our class Payton and Maddie won and get to be the first to read so great selections! Some exciting new is that we worked hard to earn letters each day, at the end of the day however many letters we earned is how many marbles go in the jar. Well, we filled the jar! Next week we will earn our reward of making a little slime. Of course we will link this activity to some math problem solving as well! Please look for an email from me next week about our mystery reader schedule and sign up!
Have a great long weekend!
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We had a lot of fun this week and are really starting to get into our routine. We had a really fun time in the Maker Space this week finishing up our discussion about our summer reading book. We did one final STEM project where we had to design and make a prototype foot for Roz. We have also finished our first math unit this week and will be moving on to addition and subtraction in unit 2. Please know that just because we move on in math doesn't mean we are done with those concepts. We continue to use place value ideas all year long. We have also finished up our Social Studies unit on Map Skills and will be moving into a Science unit about electric energy next. In reading we have been working on talking about books and choosing books. We even had fun buzzing about books to get someone else interested in what we are reading. We have also been spending time working on our reading stamina here at school. During Writer's Workshop we have been collecting ideas for narrative story writing. We have even started writing some stories to build up our writing fluency and get our ideas out! We will be working all trimester to draft and type a finished product! Student Council speeches and elections were this week. I was so proud of all these students for stepping up and wanting to be leaders in our school. Our class voted and Abigail was elected the representative from our class and Matty will be the alternate. Have a great weekend!
This has been a busy week! This is the first week EVERYONE is able to go to their instrument or music lessons. Don't forget to check when those instruments are needed! In Social Studies we have been working with longitude and latitude. This week we used Google Earth to help us understand! The students entered specific latitude and longitude coordinates to realize that those numbers take them to an exact location. We got to see the Statue of Liberty, Disney, Pyramids in Egypt and much more! In reading we talked about character traits. Inside traits and outside traits. We used The Wild Robot as a common book we could all talk about. Then we made ourselves as robots and brainstormed character traits about us! We have also been working on being independent learners during our I/E block. There is nothing new taught during this time, so students have time to work on what is right for them during this time. In math we have continued to work on place value. This week we focused on rounding. Mr. Grenham came in this week and read a great story and had a great discussion with us! I really enjoyed meeting everyone at PIN. Remember if you have any questions please feel free to reach out. I forgot to mention one thing about homework. I will never send home something new we are learning for homework. I always try to make sure it is something we have been working on for awhile so that the students are mostly independent. If homework, especially math is ever a struggle please write a note or an email and let me know. It isn't worth spending hours frustrated. Don't forget to sign up for the Remind App you can choose to receive them as a text or an email. There are several times when I will send little reminders there and not send a whole email. A note about fidget spinners: These have become very distracting. If you child has trouble focusing or paying attention and has a fidget tool the expectation is that it is used as tool. Sometimes students have these and they don't really need them and it becomes a distracting toy. Please have a discussion with your child if they are bringing them to school so that they understand the difference. I did talk with them today about this and I hope they make good choices.
Welcome back to school! We had a busy first few days. We spent some time getting to know each other and participating in some team building activities. Core Values: At Dale Street we have 4 Core Values that help be the best learners and people that we can be. WE spent some time this week talking about them and brainstorming examples and what each value means to our class. Team Work: Working together is a big part of 4th grade. Being part of a group, helping each other and problem solving together. We completed a STEM activity where the students worked in groups to build a structure out of straws. They had to make a cup part of their structure and we tested how strong it was by adding marbles to the cups. I was impressed by all the ideas and cooperation! The students worked in groups to complete team drawings where it gave us a good visual of team work and cooperation. Each student had a color and they were the only ones who could use it. At the end, if they had great team work we would see a pretty even amount of each color. Week 2...we started our learning! In Math we started learning about place value of bigger numbers. We also started learning the routines of our math workshop time. Social Studies: We started learning about Map Skills. We also have been talking about our summer reading book and started building our reading and writing stamina! We even completed a digital breakout in groups about The Wild Robot. We also took time to visit the LMC/Makerspace this week. We were all eager to get in there and see what awesome books Mrs. Cowell has. On Friday we had our turn with class set of Chromebooks. It is exciting learning about technology and all the fun things we will be doing this year on them. We also had all of our specials this week and it was fun meeting new teachers! Instrument lessons started this week. So many new rules, routines, and expectations in the first few days but these students have done a SUPER job! Have a great weekend. I am looking forward to meeting everyone at PIN next week!
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Ms. MacDonaldWelcome to grade 4! Archives
February 2018
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